


You Find It and Keep It

by Vagrant_Blvrd



Series: Kings of Nowhere [24]
Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Alternate Universe-GTA V, F/M, Fake AH Crew, Female Jack, Pre-Fake AH Crew, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-29
Updated: 2018-05-29
Packaged: 2019-05-15 07:07:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14785797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vagrant_Blvrd/pseuds/Vagrant_Blvrd
Summary: Jack comes from a poor family. Single mom, dad dead before she learned to walk but that’s okay.





	You Find It and Keep It

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt fill for Anon who wanted fem jack x geoff and the soulmate au where you have a black spot and when you touch your soulmate for the first time, it changes into colours.

Jack comes from a poor family. Single mom, dad dead before she learned to walk but that’s okay. She’s got plenty of uncles looking out for her, more than she can count. Guys who worked with her dad or have known her mom since they were kids. Rough around the edges, dirty jokes and swearing like sailors but good hearts for the most part.

Always a few hanging around the garage. Little business run by her dad and mom, but when he dies it’s just Jack’s mom and a couple of guys she hires on to keep it running. 

Jack figures out there’s something more to the garage when she’s too young to understand all of it. Just knows her mom and uncles try to keep her out of it, away from the guns and the drugs and everything else, but Los Santos isn’t the kind of place where you keep your innocence for long. (Still, they try, and when she’s older and sees the kind of people living in Los Santos, Jack gains a whole new appreciation for the fact they tried so hard.)

Her mom’s rough as any of her uncles, keeps them all in line with a look, a sharp word. Anywhere else it’d be hilarious to see some two hundred pound plus wall of muscle come to heel so meekly, contritely, but here?

It’s a bit of a life goal for Jack. Has her right beside her mom down in the garage working on cars and getting her hands dirty. Oil and grease and the kind of muscle you build helping to haul part and engines around, rebuild a car from the ground up.

Her uncle Dennis is the one who teaches her to drive when she’s thirteen. Starts her out on a beaten up piece of shit he brings around from somewhere. Claims she needs to learn to drive a stick even though manual transmissions are getting rare around the city. Has this gleam in his eye as he looks at her, says the best drivers know how to drive one, and didn’t she say she wanted to be the best? (She did, years and years ago, knees pulled up to her chest watching some dumb movie on the television, some pretty Vinewood heartthrob sending his car slinging through the city streets like magic.)

Rough voice and calm through it all even when she stalled the car more times than she can count. Just says, “Do it again, Jack,” like he knows she can do it if she just keeps trying, so she does.

Paolo’s the one who takes her shooting when she’s fourteen, gives her directions to an Ammu-Nation with a shooting gallery and puts a gun in her hands. 

She misses her first three shots, but the fourth tags the corner of the paper target and the fifth clips the outer ring.

He brings the target back and studies it for a long moment, Jack pulling the ear protects down around her neck and wondering what she did wrong - 

“Not bad,” he says, slight twang to his words she’s always loved. “Now do it again.”

Her mom takes her aside just on her sixteenth birthday, hand resting over the smear of black on her shoulder that’s slowly been taking shape the last few years. (If she cocks her hear just so and squints, it could be tropical flower of some sort, odd little pattern.)

Jack’s looked at it in the mirror almost every day she she first noticed it, thought it was a faded bruise from a fall or knocking against something in the garage. Heart in her throat when she realized what it was, sick feeling in her stomach because her mom has a mark of her own.

Little sweep of black just above her wrist like smeared oil from working on a car, and no matter how much she loved Jack’s dad it never changed. 

(She’s seen the marks on her uncles too, and Dennis is the only one of them with the swirl of colors high up on his bicep, under his old Marine tattoo. Some kind of tropical flower and this wistful look in his eyes when Jack had asked about it once because Los Santos isn’t a city given over to things like kindness or sentiment or love. Breaks it all down and grinds it into the ground.)

“It’s bullshit,” Jack’s mom says, but there’s something like anger caught in her throat that touches her laughter. Anger and this thread of bitterness. “People go chasing after whatever they think that means and it ruins them.”

Jack’s almost sixteen and she drives a manual better than half the adults she knows. Might not be a dead-shot but she hits what she aims for and better besides, and she’s getting better. She knows how to break a car down and build it up again ten times better. Never really knew her dad, but her mom talks about him all the time. (How proud he’d be of her, how he wanted to be the one to teach her to drive, take her shooting.) 

She knows her dad was never her mom’s soulmate but they loved each other better than people who are – she’s seen them come into the shop. On the street, brilliant colors telling the whole world they’ve met the person who’s supposed to be their other half and not a shred of love between them.

“I know, mom,” she says, and there’s that sick feeling again because - 

Jack saw her mark and it scared the hell out of her because she’s seen what people will do for it. How it’s not like anything in the movies at all, and now - 

“Make your own happiness,” Jack’s mom tells her low and fierce. “You go out there and make your own damn happiness and don’t listen to what anyone has to say about it, you hear me?”

And Jack’s mom, five foot nothing and able to bring men twice her size to heel with a look, a sharp word, she’s someone to look up to, admire. 

“I will, mom, I will,” Jack promises her, promises herself.

Her mom sighs, and Jack notices how tired she looks for the first time. How much older she looks than she really is.

“Good. Now go get dressed. I have a surprise for you.”

========

Jack’s sixteen when she goes up in a plane for the first time, and she's _in love_.

Her mom flashes her a grin as she takes the Mammatus through a barrel roll just for the fun of it.

“Your turn Jack,” she says, and takes her hands off the controls.

========

Jack doesn’t stay at the garage for long. Ends up picking up jobs on the side and doesn't want to bring trouble to her mom’s door so she gets a shitty apartment on the other side of the city. 

She gets looks from her mom, but she never asks. Just tells Jack to come by for dinner when she can, and that, at least, Jack can do.

She builds up a reputation quickly as one of the best getaway drivers out there, and it’s decent work. (She gains a better reputation as someone who doesn’t take anyone’s shit, will damn well put some piece of shit in his place if he looks at her wrong, just fucking try her.)

Somewhere along the line she starts wearing Hawaiian shirts. The gaudier the better, amasses a veritable collection of the things, and laughs to herself at the shittiest joke she’s never told when people ask her about her odd fashion choices.

She works with shitty crews and goddamned idiots a few times, but that’s none of her business, is it? All she has to do is get them away from but it’s not the cops and she gets paid a hefty sum and that’s that - 

Or would be, but then she meets Geoff.

Years down the road, Jack in her twenties and a name that gets bandied about when crews are looking for people like her more often than not. 

They meet at a bar, Geoff with his ridiculous mustache and suit. Riot of colors peeking out of his sleeves, and she has a moment of disconnect when she sees them, until she realizes they have to be tattoos. 

Not – not taboo, really, but certainly questionable when people are all about finding their other half Searching for those black marks all their lives and how disconcerting it is to run across someone who’s trying to hide theirs. (Or overcompensating, and that’s even more disturbing, cause for alarm.)

She knows who he is, vaguely.

There have been rumors all over town for the past month that one of the Roosters has been looking to start up a crew out here. (Some say he was kicked to the curb, others say he’s got something up his sleeve. No one knows for sure.)

“I heard you can fly just about anything.”

Jack takes her drink from the waitress with a quiet thanks and slips folded up bills of money before she turns to look at Geoff.

Disheveled hair and wrinkled suit. Half-empty whiskey tumbler in front of him and that damn smile of his.

“For the right price,” Jack says, and takes a sip of her drink.

There’s a gun under her jacket and a knife in her boot and years of proving to people in this city she’s not just a pretty face just in the scars she wears proudly. 

And Geoff – he’s smiling at her like he knows damn well she won’t hesitate to use either of them if he gives her reason to.

“Thought you’d say that,” Geoff says, and that’s where everything goes downhill.

He makes a deal, offers to pay Jack twice her usual price because he needs her in a Cargobob for a little job of his. Nothing too big, really, just Geoff and some hired guns and Jack, if she says yes.

Jack considers it, fingernails tapping on the side of her glass, vivid red that’s chipped and faded because Jack still loves working on cars after all this time. Grease and oil and the kind of muscles you build doing hard, honest work in a city that laughs in the face of things like that.

“Sure,” she says, and holds her hand out. “Why not.”

========

See, Jack’s an idiot sometimes. 

Feels a twinge of something in her shoulder after Geoff shakes her hand, laughter bubbling out of him as he signals for another round of drinks, and doesn’t think much of it at the time. Sore muscles probably, not the first time it’s happened.

It isn’t until she’s back at her place later than night, staring at her reflection in the mirror that she realizes, because that black smear on her shoulder?

It’s burst into a beautiful riot of colors, taken on clear lines of those tropical flowers she used to imagine when she was younger. Sharp curves of leaves, and Jack laughs and laughs and laughs because _of course_.

========

Geoff is one of the most infuriating people Jack’s ever met.

Brilliant as hell but so stupid about it and as much as she love him, he drives her crazy.

“So what do you think about the Vagabond?”

Jack tosses the stress ball Gavin gave her as a joke up into the air and watches it seem to hang there for a moment before gravity reasserts itself and it drops into her hands.

“I think he’s a fucking menace,” Jack drawls, that hint of an accent she picked up from Paolo drifting in. “Do you not remember what he did to the Asps?”

Dumb name for a dumb crew, really. Idiots who overstepped their bounds and then got stepped on when the Vagabond caught wind of what they were doing.

Big scary bastard who goes around in a mask and scares the hell out of half the city, sure. But the man has morals, shuts assholes like the asps down fast. Doesn’t let them get a bigger foothold on the city than they initially carved out for themselves, and Geoff’s thinking of hiring him on.

One-man army who according to the rumors doesn’t exactly play well with others.

Geoff scoffs, like he doesn’t think the Vagabond won’t go after them if he thinks there’s a reason to, or maybe just for fun.

“Well, yeah,” Geoff says, “but those guys were assholes.”

Jack sighs, sharing a look with Ray who just shrugs before going back to his game.

Michael and Gavin are off on a job and it’s just the three of them in the penthouse at the moment, this small crew Geoff’s built up over time. Always guns for hire coming and going when they need an extra gun, more hands for a job or heist, but these idiots who’ve decided to stick around for the long haul, Jack among them.

It’s been years since Jack met Geoff in that dingy little bar, since her mark blossomed ( _ha_ ) and in all that time Geoff hasn’t given any indication that his mark (if he has one) has reacted.

And that’s - 

It’s not resentment or bitterness in Jack’s heart, no, because she learned a long time ago to make her own happiness. Learned from her mother who never let this city break her even after everything she’d been through. Learned from her uncles and so many others over the years that life is short, fleeting, and waiting on someone to come into her life to find happiness was a mistake.

It’s not resentment or bitterness because Geoff is the best damn friend she’s ever had, loyal and steady and true, even if he is a dumbass.

Jack’s seen soulmates who treat each other like shit, even though they share this sacred bond everyone’s supposed to dream about, hope for. She’s seen people learn to hate each other over them, turn angry and bitter and resentful, so this?

Geoff’s friendship and laughter and solid presence in her life that she’s never once doubted? Far, far better than anything she could have hoped for.

“Fine,” Jack says, and whips the stress ball at Geoff, grinning at his startled shriek. “Your funeral.”

========

They meet the Vagabond in an old warehouse. Michael right next to Gavin because for all Gavin’s smart, he’s also incredibly stupid, and they’re all a little on edge.

Ray’s leaning on the wall, trying to look bored, but Jack’s known him long enough to know better, and Geoff - 

Geoff is standing there with his hands in his pockets like this is all fun and games, no reason to worry. Jack’s at her usual spot just behind and to the right of him, and the Vagabond - 

Steps out of the shadows with barely a sound.

“Sorry I’m late,” he says, amused as he takes each one of them in, Gaze lingering on Gavin for some reason before he focuses on Geoff. “Traffic.”

Jack raises an eyebrow at that because it’s the middle of the night, but Geoff’s already stepping forward, spiel at the ready.

========

Time flies in Los Santos.

Goes from Jack’s first fuzzy memories of her mom, the garage, to learning to drive and firing her first gun. That glorious moment her mom took her up in that old Mammatus and showed her the sky and everything since then.

From Geoff’s job offer to Michael to Ray to Gavin. To goddamned Ryan, and there are still days Jack’s certain Geoff made a mistake there. Bringing in someone somehow more chaotic than all three of the Lads combined and hoped he could somehow keep him in line. 

To Lindsay and Jeremy and Matt and Trevor and all the other terrors that have filled the ranks over the years. Jeremy stepping up when Ray couldn’t stand still anymore, rueful smile and quiet apology and something stronger than any regret calling to him out there.

Ups and downs and all these idiots at the heart of it, Geoff most of all.

“I think I’m getting too old for this shit,” Geoff says, more like whines, ice pack on his knee and ugly bruise rising on his cheek. 

Jack rolls her eyes and walks over to where Geoff’s sprawled on the couch, jacket off and shirt quickly following suit as he pokes and prods at his shoulder.

Nothing broken or dislocated, just badly bruised, but Jack knows it has to hurt, but she doesn’t say anything.

Mainly because she knows - 

“You know,” Geoff says, words a little mushy because he’s missing a tooth and his lip is split and even though they’re all a little roughed up the heist was successful. “This is the part where you reassure me I’m not too old for this shit, if you were wondering.”

The others are hiding out in various safehouses around the city until B-Team gives them the all clear, and until then there’s nothing to do but wait.

“You’re a forty-something year old man,” Jack says, no mercy in her for this because Geoff should really know better by now, “what do you want me to say?”

“Not that!” Geoff says, indignant and so very Geoff that Jack can’t help but laugh.

“Fine, fine,” Jack says, and clears her throat to launch into the prepared speech she has about how Geoff is not in fact an old man and how everyone in the crew reveres and admires him and on and on with the piled on praise and ego-stroking that Geoff actually hates until he breaks, but - 

“Oh.”

There are flowers under Geoff’s hand, still absently rubbing his shoulder.

Bright, vivid tropical flowers wits sharp-bladed leaves in an odd little pattern reminiscent of the Hawaiian shirts Jack took to wearing as a joke so long ago.

Too clear, colorful to be a tattoo and from the way Geoff suddenly stills he has to know she’s seen.

She’d thought, when her own mark bloomed to life, that it was possible Geoff didn’t have one. Might have been one of the rare who never developed a mar of their own. (The ones who turned resentful and bitter and mean at their core, railing at the world for its unfairness all their lives.)

“Uh,” Geoff says, twisting around to look at her, eyes wide. “About that.”

Jack opens her mouth to say something but she can’t seem to find her words so she closes her mouth and gently presses the ice pack against the bruises springing up around Geoff’s – his _mark_ until he reaches up to hold it in place himself.

Jack sits on the couch next to Geoff and waits, because Geoff is staring at her like – like Jack doesn’t know, really.

Awkward and nervous and scared, and that scares her because the only time, the only time Geoff looks anything close to scared is when shit’s gone really, truly wrong. (When they thought their luck had run out and one of theirs was finally going to be taken from them because that’s what happens in this city, this life.)

“Geoff,” Jack starts, and her voice cracks on his name because - 

This.

This is why she never asked, even once in all the time she’s known him. From the moment she realized what it meant that her mark had changed, reacted, because she’s seen how it goes wrong. Gets twisted up, and she doesn’t think could stand it if that happened with Geoff.

“I didn’t think,” Geoff says, something awful about the laugh he lets out. “I didn’t think you wanted to do anything about it.”

Jack frowns at him, the way Geoff shrugs like it’s nothing. 

“You never said anything,” Geoff says, and gestures at Jack’s shoulder. “So I figured, you know. Some people don’t want anything to do with the whole mess. Thought that’s how you wanted it.”

Geoff looks down at his arms, covered in tattoos he started collecting long before he and Jack met for whatever reason. 

Could have been throwing out a dare to the world, his enemies with them. Let them think they could hurt him if they found whoever had the matching mark. Use them to hurt Geoff in the worst kind of way.

Maybe it was his way of protecting himself, Jack, and throw them off with all his tattoos. Carefully cared for and retouched when they started to fade to keep up the charade.

Hell, it’s Geoff, he might have just liked the idea of giving the world the finger, rebelling against the obsession people have over their marks. Finding the person they share this one, unbreakable bond with and living happily ever because that’s how the stories go.

Jack doesn’t know, because for all the things they’ve talked about over the years, over drinks or dinner. In the heist room or a car somewhere waiting for a heist or job to begin, nerves running high and the knowledge things could go wrong hanging over them. In the small hours of the night in places like this, defenses stripped from them because they’ve known each other too long.

“I don’t,” Jack says, tired and helpless to explain herself here. “I’ve seen too many people who take it for granted.”

Taken their mark and their soulmate for granted, as though they have no choice in the matter. That whoever fate or whatever force behind the marks have decided there’s no other way things can possibly be for them. Like they can’t leave, find a life that makes them happy elsewhere.

So many people Jack’s seen just accept it, go along with it because surely that’s what happiness must be? Find the person who made their mark come to life, filled it in with color no matter how terribly they treat you and that’s how it goes?

Geoff’s watching her, and when she falls silent, words caught in her throat because that’s not – there aren’t words for what she means. How her mom and dad weren’t soulmates but the way her mom talks about him even now - 

Dennis and Paolo and all her uncles and everyone else in her life. The damn crew, all with their marks and chasing after what they hope is their happiness in their own way. Too damn stubborn to let society dictate the way things should be.

Fucking _Geoff_.

Geoff who lets out a slow sigh, corner of his mouth lifting into a tired smile.

“You know those people are assholes, right?” he asks. “Like. Grade A assholes.”

Jack looks at Geoff, this idiot who’s been such an important part of her life for a long, long time. Total idiot and an asshole in his own right, but somehow he’s managed to turn it into an endearing trait.

He’s her best friend and the first person outside of her mom and uncles she never doubted. The one her gave her a second family in the crew, and suddenly feels stupid because she’s _happy_ here, simple as that. (Maybe it could be with Geoff, if she gives it a chance.)

“Clearly,” Jack says, and feels herself smile when Geoff throws his head back and laughs.

========

Gavin is shrieking as Ryan chases after him for some reason or other and Michael and Jeremy are cackling as they set up the fireworks for later.

The sun is starting to slip beneath the horizon and it’s oddly peaceful up here, a quiet moment they don’t get all that often.

Michael and Jeremy are setting up the fireworks for later and Gavin is being himself. Laughing breathlessly as Ryan chases him growling threats for reasons Jack wants nothing to do with, and Geoff - 

“Ah,” Geoff says, throwing his arm around Jack’s shoulders. “So peaceful.”

Jack snorts when Gavin lets out a shriek, Michael and Jeremy cackling as Ryan trips the idiot into a muddy puddle left behind from the rainstorms that swept through the city earlier that week.

“Tranquil,” Jack agrees, mouth twitching. “Relaxing.”

Geoff beams at her and leans in to peck her on the cheek like something out of a cheesy Vinewood movie, eyes gleaming with amusement.

They’re still working their way through this new part of their lives, figuring out how the pieces fit together and it’s...good.

Stumbling from time to time and making mistakes, but they make it work. That fear that’s been with Jack for so long, cold and hard in the pit of her stomach, is fading over time because for all that so much has changed between them, they’re still the same people they ever were.

“A hundred says he kills Gavin before the night’s over.”

And Jack, well. 

“Sucker’s bet,” she says, because _these idiots_.


End file.
